“I’m very happy with it. The Thiel fellowship has enabled me to sustain myself for the past year and this will allow me to sustain myself for awhile,” he said.

GigLocator was a live music aggregator, that had worldwide listings from major ticket providers and independent venues. Its competitors included companies like Index and Sequoia-backed Songkick.

“When I first moved out here through the fellowship, I had already decided that GigLocator was going to be put on the back foot,” he said. “I was unsure of what I was going to do next.” Proud said a mutual friend in the music industry introduced him to Shapiro and the deal happened over six months.

Now after working on a few projects with the mentorship of Paypal co-founder Max Levchin, he’s moved onto his next thing. He’s keeping tight-lipped about his next company though as he’s still building out the product and the team.

Proud taught himself how to build and code projects while growing up in a not-very-posh part of South London called Sutton. His mom worked in human resources, while his dad is retired. He taught himself programming at age 9 and launched GigLocator at just 18.

“I was trying to find tickets to a concert, and I thought there must be an easier way to do that,” he said. “I’ve always hacked on my own projects.”

He came over to San Francisco through the Thiel Fellowship, which gives $100,000 to promising people under the age of 20 to forgo college to work on personal projects. They get the help of Silicon Valley mentors and entrepreneurs. Some of them end up working on consumer web products, but many others work on biotechnology research, clean energy or poverty alleviation.

GigLocator was

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Crunchbase

OverviewSongkick is a ticketing vendor and online database of concerts for music enthusiasts. It offers concert discovery services for its users.
Songkick provides services partnered with more than 500 artists, used by over 10 million monthly fans, and ticketing over 10,000 events worldwide each year. It was launched in 2007 and is based in Brooklyn, New York.